PPP sells to left, polls down middle

Would Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) be better off as an independent? How would television personality Drew Carey fare as a Republican challenger to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)? Is Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine really the candidate Democrats want for Senate in Virginia?

These and many other political news stories in recent weeks have something in common: They’re based on surveys conducted by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic automated polling firm based in North Carolina whose profile has risen by leaps and bounds in recent years and stands to loom even larger during the 2012 election cycle.

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Twenty months from the next election, PPP has shrewdly capitalized on the relative void of polling in many states — and the media’s hunger for data to explain every new development.

As a result, business is booming.

“We’ve already done more business in 2011 than for the entirety of 2009,” said Tom Jensen, the firm’s director. “Our revenues for January and February alone exceeded the entirety of 2009. So all this expanding our national profile has been tremendous for our bottom line.”

The company’s revenue comes not from the polls featured in news stories but from paying clients: Democratic candidates and progressive advocacy groups such as unions, abortion rights groups and environmentalists.

The liberal website Daily Kos, with sponsorship from the Service Employees International Union, has commissioned more than 100 PPP polls to be conducted and published over the course of the 2012 election cycle. But that’s the exception, not the rule, to how the company usually makes its money.

The company’s current ubiquity is by design. PPP spotted a hole in the market, moved to fill it and is reaping the rewards.

“We just decided not to stop after the 2010 election ended,” Jensen said.

To ensure it’s hitting political hot buttons, PPP asks readers to vote on its blog for races it should survey and solicits input on wild-card candidates to include. No matchup is too far-fetched: One recent survey measured sitcom actor Charlie Sheen against Sarah Palin — among independent voters, he had the advantage.

Though PPP might seem to be simply the Democratic counterpart to Rasmussen Reports, the automated pollster that the left loves to hate, there are differences.

Rasmussen, despite its partisan reputation, claims political independence and does not conduct polls on behalf of candidates, while PPP freely admits that the left is its bread and butter — and where its sympathies lie. Some of the firm’s polling memos advocate desired outcomes or use loaded, partisan language.

On a recent poll of Colorado voters, PPP CEO Dean Debnam remarked, “It’s clear that if Republicans nominate someone as stridently right wing as Sarah Palin, they will face disaster at the ballot box next November. Their best shot is with a mainstream moderate who can still hold together the base — a daunting challenge.”

But Palin wasn’t named in the poll in question, which merely pitted President Barack Obama against either a “moderate Republican” or a “tea party Republican.”

The problem with declaring that PPP’s results lean left is twofold. One, the evidence isn’t there to back it up. And two, the firm frequently delivers numbers that the GOP finds useful — and therefore credible.

“The reason Rasmussen drives liberals crazy is that frequently their numbers point in a more conservative direction. That’s what drives the left crazy,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres said. On the other hand, Ayres said of PPP, “A lot of the numbers I see from them make sense to me.”

Last July, a detailed analysis in the conservative National Review looked behind PPP’s numbers and questioned whether the firm was chronically polling more Democrats than could reasonably be expected to turn out in their respective states in the midterm elections.

Nonetheless, conservatives haven’t become as preoccupied with PPP as liberals are with Rasmussen. PPP’s blog gets plenty of nasty comments accusing it of bias, but the pollster hasn’t become a bugbear to the professional right.